At 4 billion miles from Earth, MU69 (also nicknamed Ultima Thule) is the farthest-away object a human spacecraft has ever visited. For the past few years, scientists have labeled MU69 as an unknown, mysterious “puzzle.” After the 13-year-old New Horizons spacecraft eventually swooped by the frozen rock on New Years Day 2019, the object graduated to a snowman-shaped frozen rock.

Now, after receiving new images of MU69, planetary scientists suspect that both of its “lobes” are flattish, too.

These latest observations, which revealed the object in a new light, create more puzzles. Other solar system objects similar to MU69 — like comets, for instance — have rounder, though still imperfect, forms.

“It would be closer to reality to say Ultima Thule’s shape is flatter, like a pancake,” Alan Stern, who heads the New Horizons mission, said in a statement. “But more importantly, the new images are creating scientific puzzles about how such an object could even be formed. We’ve never seen something like this orbiting the Sun.”

New Horizons — the legendary spacecraft that captured these images of MU69 — shot the latest sequence of pictures on Jan. 1, 2019, as the spacecraft departed MU69 at 31,000 mph and hurtled deeper into the black abyss of space, toward still-unknown destinations.

These certainly aren’t the last images we’ll see of MU69, nor are they the closest. But they are the final views New Horizons captured of this far-off, icy world.

MU69 is a place of major scientific intrigue. It’s preserved in a ring of ancient frozen objects, called the Kuiper Belt, that form a ring around the solar system. Out here, temperatures drop to nearly absolute zero, or negative 460 degrees Fahrenheit, which is as cold as it can get naturally.